And away with the minutes. Dieter Roth and Music

14.03 - 16.08.2015

Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fr Gegenwart

Invalidenstrae 50-51

Berlin

Published at Hyperallergic as Dieter Roths Chaotic and Cacophonous Gesamtkunstwerkhttp://hyperallergic.com/224592/dieter-roths-chaotic-and-cacophonous-gesamtkunstwerk/

Selten gehrte Musik, Abschpfsymphonie. Die Abschpfung, Stdtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus (3.2.1979) unter

Verwendung eines Fotos von Roland Fischer, Dieter Roth Foundation, Hamburg Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser

& Wirth (lt. Zug Website)

In 1977, Friedhelm Dhl, Director of the Basel Music Academy, described Dieter Roth as

an amateur who can say something to musicians on the subject of music, non-music,

not-yet-music, no-longer-music and so on, from which musicians can perhaps learn to

speak musically, to make something out of nothing, to turn something into something

different, something personal, in this case something Dieter-Roth-ish. This process is

now underway, and to facilitate it Edizioni Periferia recently released a comprehensive

one-off (edition of 300) box-set that holds the catalogue raisonn of Dieter Roths work

as musician and music publisher. Roth recorded durational sound pieces and edited many

records, including those by Hermann Nitsch and Andr Thomkins. The box-set includes

Roths clownish Disklavier (1992) piano improvisation and the rambunctious Basel

Music Academy piece Quadruple concerto (1977), released here for the first time.

The exhibition And away with the minutes spins like a rococo confection around this

posthumously release by the legendary and influential German-born Swiss artist (born

Karl-Dietrich Roth but also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot) and his prolific noise

music projects. It is a seductive presentation of Roths wistfully perverse and reclusive

sound art, presented comprehensively for the first time here by curator Matthias

Haldemann. It significantly extends the performative impulse at the heart of the Roth

oeuvre, stressing Roths instruments and performances of music on stage alone (he once

staged a concert of howling dogs) or as a member of the artist's collective in the series

Selten gehrte Musik (Rarely Heard Music). Surprisingly, Roth commonly took up

classical forms and genres such as the quartet and the sonata and reinvented them.

Examples of such are presented in a sumptuous archive assembled by Ursula Block that

goes back to an exhibition of artists records that she presented with Michael Glasmeier

in 1989 in Berlin under the title Broken Music. There are exciting, primordial, passionate,

chaotic, frenzied, chthonic and creative cassette audio works here by Roth and others,

such as Roths enchantingly meandering piano solo Lorelei, die Langstreckensonate

(Lorelei, The Long-distance Sonata) (1978).

I recall that there was none of this cacophonous work in his 2004 show Roth Time: A

Dieter Roth Retrospective at MoMA / P.S. 1, although it was impressive. The osmotic

fusion Roth demonstrated there, and now here, is usually set within the context of the

post-war avant-garde scene that included Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell, Yves Klein, Takis,

Lucio Fontana, Robert Filliou, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, but that is merely

a convenience. Like Moorman, for Roth music was of great consequence (his favorite

composers being Schubert, Brahms and Schnberg) and he was an unique composer of

eccentric noise music who built both his own recording studio and many outlandish

musical instruments, like the wonderfully messy Keller-Duo (19801989).

Keller-Duo (19801989) built with Bjoern Roth. Kisten mit Klappdeckeln, Trinkutensilien, Audiokassetten,

Radiogerten, Aufnahmegerten, Lautsprechern, l, Acryl, Marker, Elektro-Klaviere, Violine, Kabel u.a.m. Dieter

Roth, Foundation, Hamburg Foto: Florian Holzherr, Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Everything Roth made as instument involved acting out a central concept of art-music-

life as utterly indivisible, a single enterprise in which materials are placed subservient to

emotional and sensual experience. Roth was not an artist who accepted formal

restrictions. Indeed, in seeking to annihilate them he embraced a spectrum between

Duchampian chance alteration and vast accumulation over time; often inviting the natural

world to have its way by using unstable fruit, chocolate, and sugar. Perhaps most

gallantly, he invited the dilution of his own authorship through regular concentrated

collaborations with others, including his own son Bjrn Roth. In her essay Film and

Theater, Susan Sontag identified this sort of Roth-like all-embracing tendency as a

breaking down of the distinction between artistic genres, and, as such, as one of the two

major radical positions of early (mid-1960s) post-modern art (the other trend stridently

maintaining those distinctions). This all-embracing gesamtkunstwerk ideal, which Sontag

goes on to identify as a desire for a vast behavioral magma, is typical of Roths work

when he churns musical instruments into visual art. Of course he was far from alone, as

this gesamtkunstwerk ideal of breaking down distinctions is clearly detectable in some

aspects of Fluxus, Actionism, Happenings and in the Expanded Arts that flourished

throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Roths link to Fluxus involved, among other things, his

interest in music/sound, in ephemeral materials and in an anarchic prankster humor. Like

many then, Roth was a sculptor (albeit often using fugitive materials like baked dough,

chocolate, mayonnaise, rabbit shit), painter (at times making use of used tablecloths),

skilled printmaker, collagist, poet, video diarist, elegant draftsman, publisher (in 1975 he

founded Zeitschrift fur Alles, a journal that published anything submitted to it) and noise

musician. He intensely experimented with once interesting nonconformist techniques

around the loose gesture (something now almost obligatory within Zombie Formalism,

hence conformist). Specifically, Roth generally tried to blur the boundaries between

performance and sculpture, theater and visual art, high and low culture (a goal, one must

admit now, that has ended up being merely mostly low). Yet And away with the minutes

succeeds as art by recalling Greek Dionysian ritual as a fruitfully rich model for the art of

the future because, as Wagner explained in Art and Revolution, Dionysian ritual involves

the community in a fusion of the arts by embodying one singular ideological dramatic

purpose. Wagner perceived this Greek unity as the ideal, or to put it succinctly, unity is

the ideal born out in Roths cluster-fuck work. That is its goal and fulfilling telos as total-

art, to embody singularity of unified thought and (implied) unified identity (even though

the binary opposition between the recognition of Dionysian and Apollonian

consciousness would seem to a priori conflict with such an imagined unity).

Though Swiss, I was not surprised to find Roth in Berlin, as he was a regular presence

here both as an artist and as a musician. In the 1970s, jointly with his Vienna artist

friends Gerhard Rhm, Hermann Nitsch and Gnter Brus, he organized the Berlin

Dichterworkshops (Poetry Workshops) and gave several concerts in the Selten gehrte

Musik series, whose title was coined by Oswald Wiener of the Wiener Gruppe (Roth

performed with Gerhard Rhm and Wiener on Berliner Dichterworkshop in 1973).

Alongside such documentation are early works on paper, like the cubist influenced Ohne

Titel (1950), and music objects-combines like the striking installations Bar 1 (lautloses

Bild mit Bar) (Silent Picture with Bar) (19831997) and Bar 2 (19831997) which

served in Roths lifetime as the hub of social gatherings where music was played.

Ohne Titel (1950) Schwarze Kreide und Collage auf Papier, Kunstmuseum Bern, Sammlung Toni Gerber

Schenkung 1983 Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Bar 1 (lautloses Bild mit Bar) (19831997) Audiokassetten, Radio- und Kassettengerte, Lautsprecher, Videokamera,

Blasinstrumente, Fotos, Spielzeug, Alltagsgegenstnde, Malutensilien, Glser und Flaschen u.a.m., l und Acryl auf

Holz und Leinwand, auf Rdern Maria s Walter Schnepel Kulturlis Alaptvny, Budapest / Museum Weserburg

Museum fr moderne Kunst, Bremen Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Interactive cassette mixing pieces, such as Triptychon (1979-1981), allowed a very

simple but always pleasurable experience of overlapping channels of Roths sounds,

dictated by the punch of buttons. The results provided a number of auditory rewards.

Triptychon (1979-1981) Privatsammlung Schweiz Ausstellungsansicht, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fr

Gegenwart Berlin Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Foto: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Thomas Bruns

In the course of the research for this show carried out jointly by Kunsthaus Zug, the

Hochschule fr Musik / Musik-Akademie Basel and Edizioni Periferia over a period of

several years, a large amount of unpublished material was brought to light from the

artists archives in Iceland, Hamburg and Basel. This material includes numerous audio

and video recordings such as the dramatic Mnchner Konzert (1974) (the first of the

Selten gehrte Musik concerts) that was performed in Munichs Lenbachhaus and Roths

solo Quadrupelkonzert (Quadruple Concerto) (1977), performed at the Basel Music

Academy. As part of this research project, 25 hours of interviews with Roths co-

musicians were recorded under the title Selten gehrte Gesprche (Rarely Heard

Conversations). They can be heard in the exhibition and online at

www.dieterrothmusic.ch.

When in a tipsy disposition I particularly admire Roths fluently woozy for brass

arrangement Abschopf Symphonie (1979) and the virtuosic November Symphonie

(1974) as they exemplify his idea of culture as a conflict between Dionysian excesses and

the bourgeoisie as related to the gesamtkunstwerkkonzept (concept of the total-artwork).

They also both burst with the dark undertone of too much sloppy schnapps, something

that separated him from many of the more jocular and conceptual Fluxus artists. But he

took a much less dark approach when integrating musical instruments with cassette

players and other audio devices into impromptu loosy-goosey chaotic assemblages, such

as Stummes Relief (Silent Relief) (19841988) and the sprawling Bar 1 (lautloses

Bild mit Bar), a remarkable gesamtkunstwerk admixture of the romantic aesthetic

rationalism of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and the materialistic sensationalism of Ludwig

Feuerbach.

Stummes Relief (Silent Relief) (19841988) Zerbrochene Violine, Leim, Acrylfarbe, Marker, Malutensilien,

Sperrholz, Zeichenutensilien, Abfall in Geigenkoffer in Plexiglaskasten, Sammlung Aldo Frei Dieter Roth Estate

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Bar 2 (19831997) Privatsammlung Ausstellungsansicht, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum furGegenwart Berlin

Dieter Roth Estate Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Foto: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Thomas Bruns

Bar 2 (19831997) is a frantically hand-made arrangement which displays an obsession

with life as art as sound as sinister humor. A peripatetic mind tied to a grueling work

ethic is clearly sensed behind such a work, even while I sensed an overall conveyance of

craving connected to an acute awareness of drunken gaiety. One easily thinks of Friedrich

Nietzsches brilliant Genealogy of Morals where he writes of a fundamental shift in

aesthetic belief concerning Wagner, the theoretician of the gesamtkunstwerk, a concept

has been expanded and given different colors of meaning as the idea took on a broader,

and less formally synthetic sense of unity.

Roths apparent concept of the total-artwork takes on two meanings which need be

differentiated, as I wish to stress one sense (the less Wagnerian sense) of this concept and

not the exact, precise sense which Wagner intended. Rather, I am interested in using the

more generalized sense of the concept in discussing Roths work which the notion

attained as it circulated and mutated throughout Europe and the Americas. To further

complicate things, Wagners theoretical conception of the gesamtkunstwerk is double, as

one sees when reading The Artwork of the Future in tandem with Art and Revolution in

which Wagner, under the influence of Mikhail Bakounines revolutionary writing,

connected aesthetic-spiritual optimism to anarchist force as a way to combat the

encroachment of efficiency and productivity endemic to the instrumental logic of the

Industrial Revolution.

Though it is also problematic, as the fragmentation (albeit unified in collage/montage)

aesthetic intrinsic here shows us, Bar 2 is relevant in discussing interpretations of the

gesamtkunstwerk in terms of immersive worlds. Here the stress lays less with the fusion

of normally discrete art forms and more on the totalizing, harmonizing and engulfing

immersive effect of the art experience. Indeed, with Bar 2 Roth demonstrates this

extended, comprehensive sense of the idea which the notion attained in Adrian Henris

significant book Total Art, a book which concerns Environmental and Kinetic Art,

Performance, and some Happenings of the 1960s and early-1970s. In it Henri adapts the

term gesamtkunstwerk in historically contextualizing a stream of art in the 1960s and

early-1970s as work which sets out to dominate, even overwhelm; flooding the

spectator/hearer with sensory impressions of different kinds. It is not meant as

information but as experience. With this sense of a seamless union that would sweep the

viewer to another world, we can immediately see here how Roths Bar 2 succeeds at

this hyper-poly-media objective.

Joseph Nechvatal